Thursday 26 March 2009 10.27 EDT
First published on Thursday 26 March 2009 10.27 EDT

Over an almost identical period of time, specialist sex-crime units in London failed to investigate and apprehend two serial sex attackers who assaulted hundreds of women.

The duplicating of shockingly poor police work, which left women aged from their late teens to their 60s vulnerable to rape and sexual assault, has brought the leadership of Scotland Yard up short. Outside these two cases there are other examples over the last few years of failure to investigate properly when the victim is a woman and the allegation is rape or serious sexual assault, leading to allegations that the problem is not an isolated one, but could be endemic.

The echoes of the Stephen Lawrence case and the outcry that followed are obvious to Scotland Yard leaders, but this time the accusation is not racism, but institutionalised sexism and incompetence.

Details of how police failed for six years to apprehend Kirk Reid, a 44-year-old chef and amateur football referee, have appalled experienced detectives. "It's hard to believe when you look at it why they didn't spot him – it's astonishing," said one.

Before Reid, the case of John Worboys this month exposed a similarly poor investigative response to evidence that a black-cab rapist was attacking his female passengers, one of whom was told by a police officer to "fuck off, black-cab drivers don't do that sort of thing".

In Reid, officers repeatedly missed clues that suggested he was the violent street attacker responsible for a series of early morning assaults that took place at addresses along the 155 bus route from Stockwell, through Balham, Tooting and into south Wimbledon.

"He was a very dangerous man," said Detective Inspector Justin Davies, the man who identified, apprehended and charged Reid days after the case was finally handed to him last year. "He targeted women coming back very late at night, who either got off the bus or came out of tube stations and walked home. They would be a matter of yards from their front doors when he struck.

"He was ambidextrous and grabbed them from behind, putting one hand over the victim's mouth to try and pull her to the ground, then assaulting them."

The Metropolitan police sex-crime units are held up as a gold standard for forces across the country.

It was in September 2002 when officers in the Sapphire unit at Wandsworth identified 26 linked sex offences that dated back to August 2001. Two months later they matched DNA found on the victim of the August indecent assault with that from a rape victim, confirming the belief that a single attacker was targeting women.

The investigation ran for years. Leaflets were produced warning women to be careful and media alerts were issued sporadically over the years as more victims came forward.

The first intelligence report on Reid was made in December 2002, after a member of the public stopped an officer on duty to say they had seen a man following a woman on a nearby street.

Reid was spoken to by the officer, but claimed he was looking for a toilet and he was allowed to go. Officers later remembered Reid was wearing a distinctive stripy hat described by victims of other assaults.

In January 2004, Reid came on to the police radar again, when a 999 caller told the control room a man in a red Volkswagen Golf was attacking a woman. The caller gave the car's registration, but the call cut off and no further contact was made. Officers – all of whom were aware that a serial attacker was on the loose in their borough – did not follow up the details left by the caller.

Less than a month later an officer who was on the special indecency patrols, which had been formed as part of the investigation into the serial attacker, stopped Reid in his red VW Golf after he was seen tooting his horn at a woman.

The officer spoke to Reid and was not happy with his response but took no further action. His details were, however, crosschecked with the earlier report and the Sapphire team were made aware of him as part of their inquiry. Shortly afterwards he was listed as a suspect, but no one contacted him or made further inquiries.

By this time Reid, who lived in Balham, close to where the victims were attacked, had registered himself as an amateur football referee, and began to referee women's matches in Battersea park, Old Street and Wimbledon, and also children's games.

Over the next few years he worked as a chef at Camberwell college in south London, and refereed over the weekends, his confidence growing that no one would catch him.

Between February 2004, when he was identified as a suspect, and January last year, when he was caught, police believe he attacked at least 20 more women. During this period he was stopped and checked several times by officers as he cruised the streets of Clapham, Balham and Tooting.

His vehicle details were checked by suspicious officers nine times in the 12 months before his arrest, mostly in the early hours of the morning.

In February 2006, officers failed to test the clothes of a woman who came forward to say she had been attacked. This blunder was highlighted by the trial judge at Kingston crown court. "The officers, in their wisdom, decided there was no point," said the judge.

Many of the chef's victims described his "crazy eyes" and how he attacked with a blank expression on his face. One woman, who was a student when he attacked her in October 2007, said she was grabbed as she was on the phone to her boyfriend after a night out.

"I was walking back home on my own," she said. "I just heard footsteps behind me and a hand went over my mouth and someone pulled me to the floor. His other hand came out and started grabbing my crotch. I thought he was trying to get my knickers down but I was wearing tights. My boyfriend was on the phone that was still around my wrist. He thought I was being murdered."

Another victim told how she was attacked yards from her doorstep after getting off a bus in Battersea in April 2004. "It was very dark," she recalled. "I heard footsteps behind me so I took a side step to let whoever it was go by. That's when I was attacked. I never saw his face.

"He grabbed me and started pulling me back. I was trying to struggle and I screamed. I fell to the floor and I was still screaming. He said: 'Be quiet' or 'Shut up' and 'I'm not going to hurt you'.

"I ... shouted: 'Help me, help me'. He was crouching over me and he put his hand up my pants ..."

Over the years there were reviews of the case, one of which identified further forensic links matching the DNA of a rape victim to the two earlier indecent assaults. Last year the Met's intelligence bureau, which draws information from several databases, reviewed the serial attacker investigation again and identified that the rapist was still on the loose.

The case was handed last January to Davies, a detective from the homicide and serious crime command. He took home a large file on a Monday evening, and read through it; the name Kirk Reid immediately leapt out at him.

Forty-eight hours later, Davies turned up at Reid's home to ask for a voluntary DNA sample, which the chef gave, saying he had "nothing to worry about".

But on Saturday morning, five days after taking over the case, the forensic match came through: Reid's DNA matched samples from underneath the fingernails of two victims. He was arrested when he arrived home from a football match.

Late last year two other women – out of the 71 victims he attacked – contacted detectives with evidence that his attacks have gone on for more than 20 years. One claimed he had raped her in 1985, another was his ex-girlfriend, who said she had been raped by Reid in 1995. The woman contacted detectives after Reid's half brother, a Metropolitan police officer, told her he had been arrested on rape charges. "I told him it didn't surprise me," she said, "as he'd done it to me."